Women Born Transsexual

Contrary to the beliefs of some, the “Cotton Ceiling Discourse” isn’t about forcing unwilling people, lesbians or for that matter other people male/female, straight/gay/bisexual to sleep with transsexual/transgender people.  It is about treating the genitals of TS/TG people as disgusting, as a reason to reject or murder us.  It is about the shaming of those non-trans folks who sleep with us.

In short it is about TS/TG people having the same expectation of having their genitals accepted as authentic and non-disgusting as non-trans people expect their genitals to be treated.

From Trans-Advocate:  http://www.transadvocate.com/cotton-ceiling-uncovering-the-trans-conspiracy-to-rape-lesbians.htm

By Cristan Williams
September 27, 2013

Reposted with permission

The mere mention of the “cotton ceiling” should send rapey shivers up your spine. If you’ve not heard of it here’s the lowdown from feminists:

Transgender cotton ceiling rapists hold male-only (Planned Parenthood sponsored) seminars, write books, host lecture tours, and endlessly spam lesbian websites and blogs with rape and murder threats over lack of male “inclusion” in lesbian social gatherings, lesbian organizing, lesbian events, lesbian music festivals, and – most importantly- lesbian bedrooms. ¹

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Planned Parenthood Toronto is helping to sponsor a March 31 conference in Toronto that includes a workshop inviting participants to discuss and strategize ways they might be able to “overcome” women’s objections to these participants’ sexual advances. We believe that no means no, that a woman’s right to say “no” to sex at any time is sacrosanct and that no explanations should ever be requested because none is ever necessary. The name of the workshop proposed is “Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling: Breaking Down Sexual Barriers for Queer Trans Women.”

– Petition against the cotton ceiling ²

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Activists want to force lesbians to consider them as sexual partners. ³

Sounds really horrific, doesn’t it? Transwomen, full of male-privilege, feel that lesbians must submit to having sex with them or else they’re transphobic. Right? I mean, multiple lesbian feminists are all saying the same thing. Even Cathy Brennan has a cotton ceiling tag. Certainly these self-identified lesbian feminists wouldn’t lie, right? Certainly these self-declared feminists wouldn’t purposely misrepresent cotton ceiling in an effort to make ciswomen fear trans people, right? RIGHT?!?

[Cotton Ceiling commenter] you are a male sexual predator, enabling your male predator brethren. Which is why you and all your Cotton Ceiling buddies creep me the fuck out… These dudes in dresses are trying to guilt-trip you into sleeping with them, and name-calling you if you don’t. There is nothing wrong with not liking penises or male bodies, and preferring female bodies. To say otherwise is lesbianphobic. ⁴

Horrific, isn’t it? Planned Parenthood held a workshop to teach transwomen how to make lesbians have sex with them. I want to reread the previous sentence and think about that for just a moment. Then reread the rhetoric about the cotton ceiling. With a straight face, these self-identified feminists asserted that Planned Parenthood taught transwomen how trick lesbians into sex.

Seriously. And you know what? A lot of people believed it.

Here’s the reality:

 

There! See it? It says right there in the description: Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling will explore having sex with lesbians who don’t want to have sex with trans people! It says it right there… oh wait… it doesn’t say that at all.

Can you guess how many attended this,  the workshop-heard-round’-the-feminist-world?  Was it…

1. 250 workshop attendees
2. 150 workshop attendees
3. 75 workshop attendees
4. 50 workshop attendees
5. 25 workshop attendees
6. 10 workshop attendees
7. 7 workshop attendees

If you guessed 7, you’d be correct. Let that sink in for a moment. All of this over a workshop with 7 people.

Care to guess what they talked about?

Would it really surprise you to know that what they talked about was body image and shame?

Seven people met to talk about body image and shame and Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) claimed that Planned Parenthood was organizing a meeting to teach trans people how to rape lesbians… and many, many people believed it. Were you one of the folks who believed that Planned Parenthood was teaching corrective rape?

I want you to pause for a moment and think hard about the notion that TERFs are pushing: transwomen support corrective rape.

Here, let me break down the basic TERF rhetoric:

TERF: Teh cotton ceiling is all about teaching trans people how to rape lesbians!1!!

Dupe: LOLWUT

TERF: Yeah, Planned Parenthood gave a workshop to teach trans people how to rape lesbians! No means no!

Dupe: That sounds a little strange to me…

TERF: Don’t believe me? Google any of the many, many, many TERF blogs that freaked over the Planned Parenthood workshop! #rapeculture

Dupe: Well, I did hear about how transwomen want to hang out in the women’s restroom…

TERF: Yup, it’s all about rapey rape culture!

Dupe: Yeah, I guess tranwomen are kinda rapey…

TERF: I KNOW, RIGHT?!?! Spread the word!

Dupe: I’m totally blogging about this!

Think about all the fear and enmity TERFs managed to generate over the Cotton Ceiling during this past year. They took a small meeting about shame and body image and purposefully twisted it to dupe people into believing that Planned Parenthood was teaching corrective rape tactics and MANY people believed it.

TERFs did what they almost always do. They equivocate in their arguments:

Original workshop description:  

Participants will work together to identify barriers, strategize ways to overcome them, and build community.

TERF Petition to stop the workshop:

Planned Parenthood Toronto is helping to sponsor a March 31 conference in Toronto that includes a workshop inviting participants to discuss and strategize ways they might be able to “overcome” women’s objections to these participants’ sexual advances.

Cathy Brennan, TERF Opinion Leader

Workshop supporters have suggested that “Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling” is intended to facilitate a discussion about the social construction of sexual desire. Even if this were the case, being a lesbian is not a prejudicial social construct to be overcome by expanding lesbians’ limited political consciousness around trans women’s “gender identity.”

From there all a TERF need do is appeal the transwoman-rapist meme the radical right pushes while referencing the TERF petition and sit back and enjoy their malevolent handiwork.

Back when all of this began, trans folk were really clear about what the cotton ceiling was about:

Or as a cisgender dyke organizer put it:

The idea of the “cotton ceiling” is intended to draw attention to how even in spaces that are politically and socially welcoming of trans women, transphobia often retains its influence on how we understand who is sexually desirable and who isn’t. It’s no different from other politicized criteria for desirability—people who are, for instance, fat or disabled are also often welcomed into queer women’s space but not seen as desirable compared to those hot slim, muscular, able-bodied sorts. This isn’t our fault—our entire culture tells us what’s sexy and what’s not, 24 hours a day, and that definition is terribly narrow. But it is really easy to forget how much influence advertising propaganda and social pressure can exert on what gets us wet and hard, and to let the mainstream’s terms dictate our desires. ⁵

If a small group wanted to talk about how ableism affected cultural notions of beauty and/or desirability, would feminist circles tolerate TERFs going on a yearlong campaign, claiming that those who aren’t able-bodied want to force lesbians to have sex with them?

In a culture that devalues and oppresses trans people, why is it not appropriate to discuss how these cisnormative beauty standards impact notions of desirability, how these biases relate to the fetishization of trans people and how all of this impacts the perception of trans people in queer spaces? Why is it not appropriate for transwomen to ask themselves how this affects the way we see ourselves and/or how this affects the way others view us?

Why don’t TERFs want trans people to have this discussion?

How would such a conversation affect the anti-trans TERF narrative they’ve been pushing for decades?

because the fact of the matter is that unlike born-women, who have everything (literally, everything) to lose from rape culture, transwomen have at least something (everything?) to gain. to a transwoman, cutting off her dick and turning it (inside out) into a fuckhole between her legs makes her feel better. from transwomens own mouths, we know that these fake fuckholes alleviate transwomens suffering. turning their dicks into extra-large condoms for other men to penetrate (or not, whevs…thats my hat-tip to the internet “lesbian transwomen”) actually tamps down their anxiety, and feelings of dysphoria.  ⁶

Today the Frankenstein phenomenon is omnipresent not only in religious myth, but in its offspring, phallocratic technology. The insane desire for power, the madness of boundary violation, is the mark of necrophiliacs who sense the lack of soul/spirit/life-loving principle with themselves and therefore try to invade and kill off all spirit, substituting conglomerates of corpses. This necrophilic invasion/elimination takes a variety of forms. Transsexualism is an example ⁷

[Transsexual surgery] could be likened to political psychiatry in the Soviet Union. I suggest that transsexualism should best be seen in this light, as directly political, medical abuse of human rights. The mutilation of healthy bodies and the subjection of such bodies to dangerous and life-threatening continuing treatment violates such people’s rights to live with dignity in the body into which they were born, what Janice Raymond refers to as their “native” bodies. It represents an attack on the body to rectify a political condition, “gender” dissatisfaction in a male supremacist society based upon a false and politically constructed notion of gender difference.Recent literature on transsexualism in the lesbian community draws connections with the practices of sadomasochism. ⁸

 

This should be a simple issue. How could our oppressors – men – possibly become us? How? Just by saying they are?  By the male medical industry and doctors making money off this game, declaring that they can turn men into women?  Would you agree with these men if they claimed to be a different race than they are, a race they are in a position to oppress?  Would you believe them if they claimed to be of a different species?  Why not?

If you do accept them as Lesbians, would you (as a Lesbian) want to be lovers with one?  Why not?  If you are hesitant to say “no” to their claims and demands, in spite of what you feel inside, why?  What is it that makes you agree to something that doesn’t feel right?  Does it remind you of other times when it was hard to deal with a man who refused to take “no” for an answer? ⁹

How would a serious discussion about our transmisogynistic culture, and its influence over notions of beauty impact anti-trans TERF messages?

How does shutting down this discussion benifit the TERF narrative?

Does it benifit the anti-trans TERF aims and goals to not only stop this discussion, but to colonize it in such a way that feminists would instinctively view the discussion as being an inherent part of rape culture?

“Transwomen” are not and can never be women or Lesbians – they are simply men, trying to steal our identity and culture… One way to begin to fight their oppressing Lesbians and women is to refuse to give them what they want. At the very least, PLEASE stop calling them “women” in any form, and stop using female pronouns for them… they act like typical men and intimidate and guilt trip – everything is about them. And the hell with any Lesbian who gets in their way. Some have also learned what to say to sound believably female, but if you question a bit further, they revert quickly to male bullying techniques. As for those who do have surgery, men do a lot of bizarre things for sexual gratification, such as strangling themselves to have more exciting orgasms, which has resulted in some unintentional suicides (such as that by David Carradine.)

As Janice Raymond says, “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating their body for themselves.”  It’s actually reminiscent of the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” ⁹

I think there’s a reason TERFs have put so much effort into colonizing this discourse. I think there’s a reason that they framed their colonization of trans discourse as rape prevention and I think that reason is plain to see.

I submit to you that TERFs do not want the trans community to have this discussion and they certainly do not want the cis community to question where they picked up their views – good/bad/indifferent – of trans people. I believe that such a discussion would further isolate TERFs from the rest of the feminist world.

To be clear:

TERFs have spent a year strawmanning the conversation so that a discussion about this…

 

… became a discussion about preventing a trans rape conspiracy supported by Planned Parenthood.

And so, by way of summation, an excerpt from Cesaire:

… Lying is your trademark.
And you have lied so much to me
(lied about the world, lied about me)
that you have ended by imposing on me
an image of myself.
underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior,
That is the way you have forced me to see myself
I detest that image! What’s more, it’s a lie!
But now I know you, you old cancer,
and I know myself as well

 

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1. http://tinyurl.com/ms5289e

2. http://www.thepetitionsite.com/917/570/206/support-womens-sexual-autonomy/

3. http://tinyurl.com/oa3lsy9

4. http://tinyurl.com/mj3vlcc

5. http://www.transadvocate.com/if-trans-women-arent-welcome-neither-am-i.htm

6. http://factcheckme.wordpress.com/2010/07/16/rape-culture-birthed-the-neovag/

7. Gyn/ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism by Mary Daly, pp 70 – 71

8. Sheila Jeffreys

9. http://bevjoradicallesbian.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/bev-jo-radical-lesbian-writing/

From Truth Out:  http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/19050-the-experiment-requires-that-you-continue-obedience-to-corporate-state-authority-in-an-increasingly-dangerous-consumer-society

By Yosef Brody
Sunday, 29 September 2013

Fifty years ago this month, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram published a groundbreaking article describing a unique human behavior experiment. The study and its many variations, while ethically controversial, gave us new insight into human tendencies to obey authority, surprising the experts and everyone else on just how susceptible we are to doing the bidding of others. The original experiment revealed that a majority of participants would dutifully administer increasingly severe electric shocks to strangers – up to and including potentially lethal doses – because an authority told them that pulling the levers was necessary and required (the “shocks,” subjects found out later, were fake). People who obeyed all the way to the end did so even as they experienced tremendous moral conflict. Despite their distress, they never questioned the basic premise of the situation that was fed to them: the institution needed their compliance for the betterment of the common good.

Milgram was driven by the need to comprehend Nazi horror, and today his research is rightly recognized as a warning of how easily things can go wrong if people obey authority uncritically and systematically. Yet its social contribution is only rarely understood to have here-and-now implications. We urgently need to update our appreciation of the perils of obedience to accommodate our contemporary global situation.

The most powerful authorities today make demands that can appear pretty reasonable on the surface – yet are driving us toward oblivion. Climate scientists have reached consensus that our behavior, if unchanged, is likely to result in social and environmental devastation, including mass species extinctions and human suffering on an unprecedented scale. Will our society continue to pull levers until we administer catastrophic doses?

The Milgram experiments offer a potentially helpful metaphor for our current predicament, one that I will expand on below. But first a few words on obedience and disobedience more generally.

Universal Experience, Social Construction and Personal Choice

Obedience and disobedience are universal social experiences. All human beings know what it feels like to obey – with varying degrees of enthusiasm – and we all know what it feels like to disobey. Each of us has plenty of experience with both, and we are always capable of one or the other at any given moment. Every individual with the capacity for independent thinking and action makes multiple daily decisions about whether to obey or disobey various laws, rules, wishes and suggestions of others, whether we are aware of these decisions or not.

Modern societies are largely founded on the seductive idea that valuing obedience over disobedience will bring personal success and social cohesion. We are taught from an early age that even minor disobedience will sharply increase the likelihood of scary prospects like personal failure and social chaos. These emotionally powerful messages are drilled into us at home and at school, cultivating the necessary habits for powerful interests to function effectively, from parents and teachers to state institutions and large multinational corporations.

When it comes to the nature of obedience-disobedience, there is nothing we could accurately call normal. While obedience can be a particularly strong habit to break, humans (in contrast to other primates with more hard-wired social behavioral programming) are born neither obedient nor disobedient. We have strong tendencies to engage in both types of behavior across cultures and generations, in rational and irrational ways. Whether to obey or disobey in any given situation is a personal choice. Human social reality is extremely variable and complex. As long as we remain social creatures, we must deal with the obedience-disobedience question.

Continue reading at:  http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/19050-the-experiment-requires-that-you-continue-obedience-to-corporate-state-authority-in-an-increasingly-dangerous-consumer-society

From Salon:  http://www.salon.com/2013/09/28/the_decline_of_america_could_be_positive_partner/

Bearing less responsibility will have benefits for the country, even if that means wielding less power

By Patrick L. Smith
Saturday, Sep 28, 2013

There are two key questions. The first: Do Americans want a future that is different from the present or the past? To put it another way, is it possible for Americans to maintain a self-respectful notion of national identity within a new, disillusioned history of themselves?

The second key question: Can Americans remember differently — and therefore advance differently, without the nationalist and exceptionalist identity that carried them to 2001?

We have little to go by in terms of an existing record in American history, and what we have is not encouraging. The Bush years amounted to a simple denial of historical facts, a life-wasting, resource-wasting lunge for American power, even though it had already slipped away.

The Obama presidency, for all its initial promise of change, has been an even bigger disappointment in some respects, given the electorate’s initial hopes. It has offered very little in the way of forward movement.

Barack Obama has clung to the same prerogative rights to conduct military action wherever he sees fit. His administration is guilty of many of the same abuses of law that characterized the Bush years.

Apply a blind and one cannot tell the difference between the security-related legislation Obama has passed and what Bush enacted from the Patriot Act onward.

Does this reflect a cynical liberal effort to mollify conservative adversaries on all questions related to defense in order to preserve power? Or does it signify some frightening, invisible hold the defense and intelligence establishments have over our political life?

The unknowable surveillance machinery

One suspects that Obama’s heart has not been in much of what he has done overseas, but one cannot tell. The Cold War and the military and surveillance machinery that arose from it made the American government unknowable in such respects. Fighting global terrorism has only rejuvenated and strengthened that deeply engrained tradition.

Continue reading at:  http://www.salon.com/2013/09/28/the_decline_of_america_could_be_positive_partner/

From Alternet:  http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/noam-chomsky-america-openly-brags-about-boom-times-its-drone-wars-while-casuallty

The U.S. openly brags about boom times for its drone wars, while casually abandoning our 800 year-old system of due process.

By Steven Garbas, Noam Chomsky
September 25, 2013

This article first appeared at Satellite Magazine, whose author Steven Garbas met with Chomsky in Cambridge, Massachusetts earlier this year to discuss the development of the drone era under president Obama.

Noam Chomsky: Just driving in this morning I was listening to NPR news. The program opened by announcing, very excitedly, that the drone industry is exploding so fast that colleges are trying to catch up and opening new programs in the engineering schools and so on, and teaching drone technology because that’s what students are dying to study because of the fantastic number of jobs going on.

And it’s true. If you look at the public reports, you can imagine what the secret reports are. It’s been known for a couple of years, but we learn more and more that drones, for one thing, are already being given to police departments for surveillance. And they are being designed for every possible purpose. I mean, theoretically, maybe practically, you could have a drone the size of a fly which could be buzzing around over there [points to window] listening to what we’re talking about. And I’d suspect that it won’t be too long before that becomes realistic.

And of course they are being used to assassinate. There’s a global assassination campaign going on which is pretty interesting when you look into how it’s done. I presume everyone’s read [a May 29]  New York Times story, which is more or less a leak from the White House, because they are apparently proud of how the global assassination campaign works. Basically President Obama and his national security advisor, John Brennan, now head of the CIA, get together in the morning. And Brennan’s apparently a former priest. They talk about St. Augustine and his theory of just war, and then they decide who is going to be killed today.

And the criteria are quite interesting. For example, if, say, in Yemen a group of men are spotted by a drone assembling near a truck, it’s possible that they might be planning to do something that would harm us, so why don’t we make sure and kill them? And there’s other things like that.

And questions did come up about what happened to due process, which is supposedly the foundation of American law—it actually goes back to Magna Carta, 800 years ago—what about that? And the justice department responded. Attorney General Holder said that they are receiving due process because it’s “discussed in the executive branch.” King John in the 13th century, who was compelled to sign Magna Carta, would have loved that answer. But that’s where we’re moving. The foundations of civil law are simply being torn to shreds. This is not the only case, but it’s the most striking one.

Continue reading at:  http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/noam-chomsky-america-openly-brags-about-boom-times-its-drone-wars-while-casuallty

From Common Dreams:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/09/29-4

by Karin Kamp and John Light
Published on Sunday, September 29, 2013 by Moyers & Company

For the first time, the world’s top climate change scientists have endorsed an upper limit on greenhouse gas emissions, establishing a target level for curbing emissions that if not achieved could lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climatic changes.

In a report released Fridayby the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN’s climate panel, scientists also said that the target is likely to be exceeded in a matter of decades unless steps are taken soon to reduce emissions. To contain these changes will require “substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions,” the scientists said.

The panel hopes that its latest report will help move international policymakers toward agreement on a new climate treaty, as negotiations have stalled in recent years. The report also concluded that many of the observed changes in climate since 1950 were “unprecedented over decades to millennia” and that over half of the temperature increases were man-made.

“Our assessment of the science finds that the atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amount of snow and ice has diminished, the global mean sea level has risen and that concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased,” said Qin Dahe, co-chair of the IPCC working group that produced the report.

In reaction to the news, Kumi Naidoo, the executive director of Greenpeace International, said: “The IPCC warns of an alarming escalation of impacts but also shows that preventing climate chaos is still possible.”

Speaking at a press conference in Washington, DC, Naidoo added that the panel’s warnings call for immediate action. He also pointed to the on-going situation regarding Greenpeace activists who are being held in Russia after they protested oil drilling in the Arctic.

“Unfortunately those who are taking this action are now in prison in Russia, while those that are most responsible are protected by governments around the world,” Naidoo said. One of the main obstacles to addressing climate change is a lack of political will, in particular on agreements that would create legally binding and internationally enforceable targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Window of opportunity

Naidoo talked about the urgency of these issues in this weekend’s interview with Bill Moyers. As the Arctic melts and sea levels rise, Naidoo said bold steps are needed on the part of policymakers in the international community to create an “energy revolution” to ensure carbon emissions drop dramatically.

Continue reading at:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/09/29-4

From The Guardian UK:  http://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2013/sep/27/ipcc-climate-change-report-global-warming

The message from the IPCC report is familiar and shattering: it’s as bad as we thought it was

by George Monbiot
Friday 27 September

Already, a thousand blogs and columns insist the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change‘s new report is a rabid concoction of scare stories whose purpose is to destroy the global economy. But it is, in reality, highly conservative.

Reaching agreement among hundreds of authors and reviewers ensures that only the statements which are hardest to dispute are allowed to pass. Even when the scientists have agreed, the report must be tempered in another forge, as politicians question anything they find disagreeable: the new report received 1,855 comments from 32 governments, and the arguments raged through the night before launch.

In other words, it’s perhaps the biggest and most rigorous process of peer review conducted in any scientific field, at any point in human history.

There are no radical departures in this report from the previous assessment, published in 2007; just more evidence demonstrating the extent of global temperature rises, the melting of ice sheets and sea ice, the retreat of the glaciers, the rising and acidification of the oceans and the changes in weather patterns. The message is familiar and shattering: “It’s as bad as we thought it was.”

What the report describes, in its dry, meticulous language, is the collapse of the benign climate in which humans evolved and have prospered, and the loss of the conditions upon which many other lifeforms depend. Climate change and global warming are inadequate terms for what it reveals. The story it tells is of climate breakdown.

This is a catastrophe we are capable of foreseeing but incapable of imagining. It’s a catastrophe we are singularly ill-equipped to prevent.

The IPCC’s reports attract denial in all its forms: from a quiet turning away – the response of most people – to shrill disavowal. Despite – or perhaps because of – their rigours, the IPCC’s reports attract a magnificent collection of conspiracy theories: the panel is trying to tax us back to the stone age or establish a Nazi/communist dictatorship in which we are herded into camps and forced to crochet our own bicycles. (And they call the scientists scaremongers …)

In the Mail, the Telegraph and the dusty basements of the internet, Friday’s report (or a draft leaked a few weeks ago) has been trawled for any uncertainties that could be used to discredit. The panel reports that on every continent except Antarctica, man-made warming is likely to have made a substantial contribution to the surface temperature. So those who feel threatened by the evidence ignore the other continents and concentrate on Antarctica, as proof that climate change caused by fossil fuels can’t be happening.

Continue reading at:  http://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2013/sep/27/ipcc-climate-change-report-global-warming

From Climate Story Tellers:  http://www.climatestorytellers.org/stories/subhankar-banerjee-arctic-sea-ice-game-over/

by Subhankar Banerjee,
September 27, 2013

The Arctic sea ice is the most famous visual indicator of climate change. This year the climate deniers took the lead to explain what’s going on with the Arctic sea ice. “And now it’s global COOLING! Record return of Arctic ice cap as it grows by 60% in a year,” by David Rose in the Mail on Sunday, and “Global warming? No, actually we’re cooling, claim scientists” by Hayley Dixon in The Telegraph—both published on September 8—led the parade. Quoting all these irresponsible disinformation, on September 10, Greg Gutfeld of Fox News put an end to global warming with these words: “Global warming? Yes, it’s finally dead.”

Soon I’ll get to the science of Arctic sea ice. But first a few words about “climate zombies.”

Last year I participated as a panelist in The Anthropocene: Planet Earth in the Age of Humans symposium at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. I was on the panel “Energizing the Anthropocene: Science for Smart Decisions” with eminent climate scientist Dr. Richard Alley. Richard first gave a long view of global warming, and then provided a road map of how with a $1 trillion investment, the US can move away from fossil fuels entirely. He is a great communicator of climate science, especially when it comes to debunking the deniers’ bogus claims. I’ll pull some quotes from a talk he gave earlier this year in June at an American Geophysical Union–Chapman conference “Communicating Climate Science: A Historic Look to the Future” at the Snow Mountain Ranch in Granby, Colorado. His remarkable solo act is a journey through his own life and explains in less than three minutes—how climate zombies can survive on this earth, and keep reappearing.

Richard Alley (June 2013): This particular climate zombie is back in force again. While warming continued, the “global warming stopped” had a new birth of noise.

Then he shows a map of global temperature data from 1957 to now, from the Goddard Institute of Space Studies.

RA: Is it getting warmer? Yes. If you take a long enough interval, it’s up.

He then explains how the climate zombies can keep saying—global warming stopped, it’s cooling.

RA: I was born in 1957. There is the data from 1957 up to a little later. The regression line through the data, and you can see I was born—at the start of a cooling trend.

RA: I married my dear wife Cindy in 1980. We got married—at the start of a cooling trend.

RA: We moved to Penn State in 1988—at the start of a cooling trend.

RA: We came here to show our daughters the mountains here [in Colorado] in 1997—at the start of a cooling trend.

RA: They named a glacier after me in 2002—at the start of a short but steep cooling trend.

RA: Our daughter became a Penn Stater in 2005—at the start of a cooling trend.

RA: So my whole life…[big laugh]

When you look at the map you see that the temperature steadily went up from 1957 till now, but had many local minima that Richard Alley refers to as “start of a cooling trend.” He then gives an astute career advice to aspiring climate zombies.

RA: If there is a year of rapid warming, shut up! And then you can go right back to claiming global warming stopped, until the next rapid warming, then shut up, then go right back to claiming global warming stopped…ad infinitum!

This time the Arctic sea ice reporting by the climate zombies was quickly debunked: “No, the World Isn’t Cooling” by Phil Plait on Slate, “No, Arctic Sea Ice Has not Recovered, Scientists Say” by Andrew Freedman on Climate Central, “With Climate Journalism Like This, Who Needs Fiction?” by Tom Yulsman on Discover Magazine—are just a few examples.

Continue reading at:  http://www.climatestorytellers.org/stories/subhankar-banerjee-arctic-sea-ice-game-over/

From Earth 911:  http://earth911.com/general/scrap-metal-ore-future/

from Anne Staley
09/25/13

Imagine a few decades from now when we’ve sucked our planet dry of all its natural resources. You don’t think that will happen? Stick around for 30 years or so and we’ll find out, but for now I’m pretty certain that given the rate at which we’re going, we may not even have to wait that long to see that day.

According to a report published on Phys.org, we’ll need the resources of two planets to meet our demands by the early 2030s if we continue to use our natural resources and produce waste at the current rate. The report, by the way, was published in 2009.

A Valuable Industry

We’re left with very few natural resources, and the sooner we reduce our dependence on them, the better. One of the most effective ways of doing this is by recycling scrap metal that is processed into raw material, also called recycled feedstock, which is used the world over for industrial manufacturing.

Let’s break it down into numbers with the help of this ISRI fact sheet. Last year, 135 million metric tons of scrap — metal, paper, plastic, textiles, glass, rubber and electronic waste — were recycled in the United States and sold as valuable feedstock for industrial manufacturing to consumers both within and outside the country.

The value of the scrap metal was a whopping $90 billion and the recycled feedstock it was converted into was sold to more than 160 countries, generating $28 billion in export sales. (Phew, that’s as fine an example as any of letting the numbers do the talking.)

I’m not sure how many of us know that manufacturing products from recycled ore requires significantly less energy compared with using virgin ore. When I say significant, I mean really, really significant.

For example, recycling aluminum saves 92 percent of the energy required to manufacture products from raw material, while the energy savings that result from recycling copper and steel are 90 percent and 56 percent, respectively. That’s the kind of significant I’m talking about.

Continue reading at:  http://earth911.com/general/scrap-metal-ore-future/

From Alternet:  http://www.alternet.org/environment/extreme-energy-extraction-roadtrip-scary-ways-were-ruining-country-get-fossil-fuels

A look at what fracking, mountaintop removal for coal and other extraction methods are doing to communities across the country.

By Tara Lohan
September 11, 2013

The view from a Cessna reveals some dirty secrets. Flying at 2,000 feet above the forests of Appalachia I can see what the steep, tree-fringed roads fail to show: unnatural flat tops, seams of coal exposed like black-topped runways, impoundments of foul water perched above homes and schools. A naked honesty is revealed. This is what we have done, what we continue to do. We deface the mountains, denature ecosystems.

This is probably not news to you. Appalachia has long been one of the centers of American energy extraction, a place whose history is almost synonymous with coal. Since the 1830s the region has shoveled 35 billion tons of coal into the furnace of our economy. This is often called “cheap” energy and, at $100/megawatt-hour, it is – as long as you don’t look too closely.

But when you get down on the ground (or up in the air, as the case may be), the costs come into focus. Mountaintop removal coal mining is just what it sounds like: Entire mountaintops are obliterated to reach thin seams of coal. The “overburden” – the mining industry’s term for rocks and soil – is dumped into nearby valleys, burying streams, covering forests.

In a way, it makes perfect sense. First we go after the resources that are easiest to extract. And then, to maintain our wolfish appetite for energy, we have to seek out the stuff that’s harder to reach. Mountaintop removal coal mining is a classic example. Another would be the strip mining used to extract bitumen from the Alberta tar sands. Additional cases include hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling to get at shale gas and shale oil deposits.

Michael T. Klare, author of the book  The Race for What’s Left, calls these kinds of extraction techniques “extreme energy.” He has written: “To ensure a continued supply of hydrocarbons – and the continued prosperity of the giant energy companies – successive administrations have promoted the exploitation of these extreme energy options with a striking disregard for the resulting dangers. By their very nature, such efforts involve an ever-increasing risk of human and environmental catastrophe – something that has been far too little acknowledged.”

Continue reading at:  http://www.alternet.org/environment/extreme-energy-extraction-roadtrip-scary-ways-were-ruining-country-get-fossil-fuels